“In the Department of Defense, they develop systems that can’t fail,” says Mike Orosz, a research director at USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) who has collaborated with the U.S. Space Force (USSF) for the past seven years.

To ensure that new defense technology is reliable and secure, the Department of Defense (DoD) depends on something known as the acquisitions process, a meticulous methodology to manage the entire lifecycle of new products, systems, or capabilities. The workflow for this is “pretty drastic,” says Orosz. “You define everything up front, almost every line of code.”

But this approach can have an adverse effect on technological relevance by slowing down the development timeline. Some military projects, with funding in the billions, span up to a decade from conception to deployment. By the time it is delivered, evolving technology and threats may have rendered the product obsolete.

Engineering Workflows, Reimagined 

New research from Orosz’s team at ISI is investigating alternative approaches to managing defense technology. “We’re trying to apply industry best practices in the DoD acquisition world,” he says. “We’re identifying what works and what doesn’t and making recommendations to the government on how they can improve their development process with new techniques.” 

Central to their research is a concept that has revolutionized Silicon Valley: agile development. This methodology, which emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and rapid iteration, has become the gold standard in commercial software development. 

However, adopting these practices in the complex and highly regulated environment of defense acquisitions requires new guidelines and instructions. Traditionally, the defense sector has relied on the “waterfall” approach, where all requirements are defined upfront and development proceeds linearly. This rigid structure leaves little room for feedback or adaptation to changing needs. 

Orosz’s team spent seven years embedded within real USSF programs, acting as a “living laboratory” to identify strategies for implementing agile development into complex defense projects. Specifically, their study comprises a series of case studies focused on software for spacecrafts — or as they’re commonly known, satellites. 

Critical Satellites

GPS is a “dual use” technology key to both national security and economic prosperity. It is an essential ‘silent’ utility in IT and cybersecurity, transportation, economic development, and sustainment of day-to-day life around the world. From GPS navigation to digital transactions, to missile detection and intelligence gathering, nearly every aspect of modern military and civil operations rely on satellites orbiting high above Earth. 

“Space is the great enabler,” Brian Duffy, a Senior Systems Engineer at ISI who worked on the study, says. “It allows for global communications and enables critical operations that the military needs to do to support not just the country but the world.” 

The team worked across three distinct software projects for spacecraft command and control, whose exact nature are confidential. These projects encompass a traditional waterfall approach, a 50/50 hybrid of waterfall and agile methods, and a predominantly agile model, providing a spectrum of methodologies for comparative analysis. 

By working directly with USSF Guardians from Space System Command, the team gained unprecedented access to real-time project information, such as contractor data, offering project workflow insights that were previously unavailable to government oversight.

“We can track how the contractors are building their configuration items, fixing bugs, and actually see how they are accomplishing features and stories,” Duffy says.

In the waterfall project, researchers observed that the majority of software bugs were discovered late in the development cycle, a situation that can lead to significant delays and increased costs. 

In contrast, the predominantly agile project broke down the workflow into smaller, more manageable blocks, allowing bugs to be addressed throughout the development lifecycle, rather than accumulating them at the project’s end.

Agile Best Practices

Building on these insights, the ISI study also includes a series of key findings to most efficiently manage agile projects within the U.S. Space Force going forward.

One of the lessons Orosz and his team learned is the importance of upfront systems engineering — the process of planning and designing the system before development begins. Although this aligns more closely with the waterfall method, it still has benefits in an agile context. 

“Performing some systems engineering upfront allows us to populate the project backlog with initial work and define what the priorities are,” Orosz says. “It can also help identify dependencies. In the Department of Defense, it’s rare to work on a program that doesn’t intersect with a number of other programs.” 

Another critical factor for agile projects is maintaining a skilled and adaptable workforce in the face of constant turnover. Timelines can be significantly slowed by the loss of skilled personnel, especially when trying to maintain a tight release schedule on complex projects. “You have to have a really good training program and anticipate that you’re going to have some turnover,” Orosz says.

Lastly, Orosz stresses the need for agile projects to customize their performance tracking tools, a capability that is often lacking in the defense acquisition space but necessary for continuous data monitoring. “Existing tools either lag by several months, giving you out-of-date data, or you can’t use them because of foreign ownership or cyber security issues,” he says.

Lasting Impact

While the work of Orosz and his colleagues may not garner the same headlines as the latest AI breakthroughs or quantum computing advances, it could quietly speed up military innovation, impacting the country’s technological edge.

The study’s recommendations are already influencing Department of Defense acquisition practices, according to Orosz. The team has informed the Secretary of Defense’s office on agile best practices, and their documents have been distributed throughout the Pentagon’s acquisition workforce.

“The military has a lot of smart people with great ideas,” Orosz says. “We just need to be moving a little faster, and partnerships such as these help pick up the pace.”

Published on November 18th, 2024

Last updated on December 10th, 2024